Two marches on behalf of women: one with a pro-life agenda and one with a pro-choice agenda. The outcome? The networks gave nearly seven times more coverage to the pro-abortion marchers in 2018.
Katie Yoder, associate culture editor at the Media Research Center, and her colleagues watched the morning and evening news shows Jan. 19-22 for ABC, CBS and NBC to track coverage of both events.
More than 100,000 attended the 45th March for Life in Washington while more than a million attended the Women's March in cities across the country. But does that justify the extreme differences in news coverage? The networks gave a combined 25 minutes and 24 seconds to the 2018 Women's March and just 3 minutes and 46 seconds to the 2018 March for Life.
As Yoder points out, the president addressed the March for Life live via satellite from the Rose Garden, the first president to address the march live. "The networks routinely cover the president's every move so it's very odd that they didn't spend more time on this march," she told CBN News.
Yoder also noted that abortion is a huge issue in our culture which should give the mainstream media plenty of reason to cover an anti-abortion march. She noted an upcoming Supreme Court case involving the speech rights of pregancy care centers, abortion legislation debated regularly in Congress and state capitals and the federal investigation into Planned Parenthood.
Historically, Yoder said, the networks have shied away from covering the pro-life movement. MRC says the networks gave less than 24 minutes of news coverage to the March for Life during a five-year period from 2013-17. Yet, in 2017 alone, they spent three times that on coverage of the Women's March that year.
The Women's March has an explicitly pro-abortion agenda. Its mission statement affirms a commitment to "universal coverage of safe, legal, affordable abortion." In 2017 it kicked out the anti-abortion New Wave Feminists as an official sponsor because of the group's pro-life views.
The March for Life began in protest to the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision which legalized abortion on demand.
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